Роберт Уоррен - All the king's men

And she was that way when she walked out of the place, not leaning on anybody, with the nurse and Katy Maynard trailing along with that look of embarrassed and false piety which people get on their faces when they are caught in the open with the principal mourner at a funeral.

Even when–just as she was coming out the gate of the cemetery–a newspaperman jammed a camera at her and took her picture, she didn't change the expression on her face.

He was still there when I came up, a squirt with his hat over one eye and the camera hung round his neck and a grin on his squirt face. I thought maybe I had seen him around town, but maybe not, the squirts look so much alike when they grind them out of journalism school. "Hello," I said.

He said hello.

"I saw you get that picture," I said.

He said yeah.

"Well, son," I said, "if you live long enough, you'll find out there are son kinds of a son-of-a-bitch you don't have to be even to be a newspaperman."

He said yeah, out of his squirt face, and looked at am. Then he asked. "You're Burden?"

I nodded

"Jesus Christ," he exclaimed, "you work for Stark and you call somebody a son-of-a-bitch."

I just looked at him. I'd been over all that ground before. I had been over it a thousand times with a thousand people. Hotel lobbies and dinner tables and club cars and street corners and bedrooms and filling stations. Sometimes they didn't say it just exactly that way and sometimes they didn't say it at all, but it was there. Oh, I'd fixed them, all right. I knew how to roll with that punch and give it right back in the gut. I ought to have known, I'd had plenty of practice.

But you get tired. In a way it is too easy, and so it isn't fun any more. And then you get so you don't get mad any more, it has happened so often. But those aren't the reasons. It is just that those people who say that to you–or don't say it–aren't right and they are wrong. If it were absolutely either way, you wouldn't have to think about it, you could just shut your eyes and let them have it in the gut. But the trouble is, they are half right and half wrong, and in the end that is what paralyzes you. Trying to sort out the one from the other. You can't explain it to them, for there isn't ever time and there is always that look on their faces. So you get to a point in the end where you don't even let them have it in the gut. You just look at them, and it is like a dream or something remembered from a long time back or like they weren't there at all.

So I just looked at the squirt face.

There were other people there. They were looking at me. They expected me to say something. Or do something. But somehow I didn't even mind their eyes on me. I didn't even hate them. I didn't feel anything except a kind of numbness and soreness inside, more numbness than soreness. I stood there and looked at him and waited the way you wait for the pain to start after you have been hit. Then, if the pain started, I would give it to him. But it didn't start, and there was just the numbness. So I turned around and walked away. I didn't even mind the eyes that were following me or the snatch of a laugh somebody gave and cut off short because it was a funeral.

I walked on down the street with the numbness and soreness in me. But what had happened at the gate hadn't given it to me. I had had it before I came.

I went on down the Row toward the Stanton house. I didn't imagine she'd want to see me right then, but I intended to leave word that I would be at the hotel down at the Landing till late afternoon. This, of course, if something didn't break about the Boss's condition But when I got to the Stanton house I learned that Anne wasn't seeing anybody. Katy Maynard and the nurse weren't superfluous any more. For when Anne entered the house she went into the living room and stood there just inside the door and looked slowly all over the place, at the piano, the furniture piece by piece, the picture above the fireplace, the way a woman looks over a room just before she sails in to redecorate that place and rearrange the furniture (that was Katy Maynard's way of putting it), and then she just gave down. She didn't even reach for the doorjamb, or stagger, or make a sound, they said. She just gave down, now it was over, and was out cold on the floor.

So when I got there, the nurse was upstairs working on her, and Katy Maynard was calling the doctor and taking charge. There wasn't any reason for me to stay. I got in my car and headed back to the city.

But now the Boss was dead, too, and I was back at the Landing. My mother and her Theodore were off on a trip and I had the house to myself. It was as empty and still as a morgue. But even so, it was a bit more cheerful than the hospitals and cemeteries I had been hanging around. What was dead in this house had been dead a long time, and I was accustomed to the fact. I was even becoming accustomed to the fact of the other deaths. They had shoveled it over Judge Irwin, and Adam Stanton, and the Boss.

But there were some of us left. And Anne Stanton was among those left. And I was.

So back at the Landing again, we sat on the gallery side by side, when there was sun–the lemon-pale sun of late autumn–and the afternoon made its shortened arc over the onyx-mottled waters of the bay, which stretched south to the autumn-hazy horizon. Or when there wasn't any sun, and the wind piled the sea up over the beach, even to the road, and the sky seemed to be nothing but gusty rain, we sat side by side in the living room. Either place, we never talked much those days, not because there was nothing to say but because there might be too much and if you once started you would upset the beautiful and perilous equilibrium which we had achieved. It was as though we each sat on the end of a seesaw, beautifully balanced, but not in any tidy little play yard but over God knows what blackness on a seesaw which God had rigged up for kiddies. And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, the balance would be upset and we would both go sliding off into blackness. But we fooled God, and didn't say a word.

We didn't say a word, but some afternoons I read to Anne. I read the first book I had laid hand to the first afternoon when I found I couldn't sit there any longer in that silence which bulged and creaked with all the unsaid words. It was the first volume of the works of Anthony Trollope. That was a safe bet. Anthony never upset any equilibriums.

In a peculiar way those late-autumn days began to remind me of the summer almost twenty years before when I had fallen in love with Anne. That summer we had been absolutely alone, together, even when people were around, the only inhabitants of the kind of floating island or magic carpet which being in love is. And now we were absolutely alone, but it was a different kind of floating island or magic carpet. That summer we had seemed to be caught in a massive and bemusing tide which knew its own pace and time and would not be hurried even to the happiness which is surely promised. And now again we seemed to be caught in such a tide and couldn't lift a finger in its enormous drift, for it knew its own pace and time. But what it promised we didn't know. I did not even wonder.

Now and then, however, I wondered about something else. Sometimes when I was sitting beside her, reading or not talking, and sometimes when I was away, eating breakfast or walking down the Row or lying awake. There was a question without an answer. When Anne had told me about Adam's last, wild visit to her apartment–how he rushed in and said he wouldn't be pimp for her and all that–she had said that some man had telephoned Adam to tell him about her and Governor Stark.

_Who?__

In the first days after the event I had really forgotten the fact, but then the question came. At first, even then, the question didn't seem important to me. For nothing seemed very important to me then, in the pervasive soreness and numbness. Or at least what seemed important to me then had nothing to do with the question. What had happened was important, but not the cause of what had happened in so far as such a cause was not in me myself.